The question “Does God exist?” has been asked and debated, it seems, for as long as humans have been around. Over the past four hundred years or so, the question has centered on whether modern science’s understanding of the universe is incompatible with the idea of God. You would think that would be plenty of time to get the issue resolved, but it hasn’t been. Why that’s the case is probably the subject that really needs examining: Why do we keep banging away at this question without any resolution?

Last month, The Atlantic magazine included a short essay that points in the right direction for answering that question. “How to Believe in God: Scientific evidence for faith misunderstands faith” is the response by Elizabeth Brunig to a 2025 book by two French authors, God, The Science, the Evidence: The Dawn of a Revolution. For Brunig, the book fails, in my crass terms, because it is barking up the wrong tree.

As Brunig makes clear from the start, however, she is a person of faith. But she doesn’t find her faith echoed in this book. God appears not so much in the study of nature, but the experience of it. As an example, she relates this event from her college days.

I gazed down the road, preoccupied with other things—midterm exams, campus-club minutiae—and expecting the bus to trundle around the bend. A sudden icy wind tore around the corner instead, sweeping into gray branches and climbing ivy to send a spray of golden birch leaves spiraling into the sky, taking my breath along with them. And I knew that my soul was bared to something indescribably majestic and bracing—something that overwhelmed me with the unmistakable sensation of eye contact. What I saw, I felt, also saw me. Before I could rationally account for what had happened, a verse of poetry from John Ashbery came to mind:

A look of glass stops you / And you walk on shaken: was I the perceived?

That seemed to explain things perfectly, jarringly so. I was dazed in class as afternoon darkened to evening.

Brunig does not disagree per se with the argument being made in the ponderous 500 pages of God, The Science, the Evidence. Rather, it seems to her to be beside the point for it tells us nothing about the meaning of our subjective experience of God, like hers amidst swirling leaves on a fall afternoon.

To imagine that one might find traces of the divine strewn throughout the universe, or that earthly methods of inquiry might uncover some of those signs, isn’t ridiculous. But this latest round of arguments in favor of intelligent design seems aimed mostly at establishing that God could or should exist within the rational frameworks we already employ. This is both weak grounds for belief and a fundamental misunderstanding of faith. The route to durable faith in God often runs not through logical proofs or the sciences, but through awe, wonder, and an attunement to the beauty and poetry of the world, natural and otherwise.

Unfortunately, the church has had a long history of downplaying human experience as potentially misleading and even dangerous. A select few, like the apostles and the saints, are exempted and even held up as guideposts for the rest of us. But the vast majority needs to listen only to the teaching of the church to understand God and what God wants us to do. Otherwise, they are prone to have their own, unauthorized, ideas.

This attitude blew up in the church’s face, of course, when modern science clearly undid such fundamental church teachings as the age of the universe and the place of the earth within it. Since the church insisted that God was inseparable from such notions, as they evaporated, so did the God that was attached to them. Brunig is rightly concerned that, given the pace of scientific exploration, finding God in science’s latest discoveries could, in a generation’s time, suffer the same result.

It’s one thing to say that science and God are compatible. It’s something else altogether to say that science is providing “evidence” for God. For the question inevitably arises, who or what is this God that science is supposedly finding? It certainly isn’t the God of the Bible. If anything, the Bible’s conclusion is that God is a mystery and ultimately unknowable (something most Christians would prefer to ignore). See the last chapters of Job where God tells him that the natural world obscures God’s nature as much as it reveals it.

38 Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:

² “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
³ Gird up your loins like a man;
I will question you, and you shall declare to me.

⁴ “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.”

The fundamental flaw of this approach which Brunig calls out is the modern assumption that we must find evidence for God in order to believe in God. This is also the ironic flaw of modern fundamentalism: it insists on using the tools of modernity to fight its atheistic implications. In the end, of course, this always backfires. But this is actually the tendency of most forms of Christianity today.

For liberal Christians, finding scientists who believe in God (as God, The Science, the Evidence highlights—it’s actually not that hard) yields a big sigh of relief. “See, we’re not stupid for believing,” many think, as if having one’s faith thought stupid is worst possible thing. Thus, the faith of a scientist somehow carries more weight than that of, say, one’s grandmother.

Today’s struggle actually grows out of a confusion that can be traced to the beginnings of Christianity (though not to Jesus himself). And that is the difference between faith and belief. Anselm famously said that theology is “faith seeking understanding,” correctly noting that faith comes first, and exists apart from our words about it. But the church, in seeking to control its membership, insisted that “real” faith was measured by its adherence to the proper beliefs encoded in doctrine and theology.

How odd, then, that science has replaced the church with the same binding authority. Now, faith is only acceptable, not by adhering to ecclesial law, but to the laws of nature as science has determined them. But what neither the church then, or science now, understand is that faith is not measurable. Rather, faith is experienced, like love. There is no right or wrong faith, just as there is no right or wrong love. Yet both, without measurement, are very real, as anyone with faith, or in love, will tell you.

After that brisk autumn afternoon, life went on unremarkably, though I continued to mull over what the experience could mean. That it meant something at all was another strong intuition that I could not entirely account for. There were plenty of ordinary and dismissive explanations for what had happened, all related to the vagaries of the brain. Surely I had just been tired, bleary-eyed, suggestible, available—highly sensitized, in other words, to typical seasonal splendor. That made sense to me, but I didn’t believe it. The natural beauty wasn’t the cause of what I had felt, but rather an invitation to pay attention to what I felt.

And that is exactly what we have not been encouraged to do: pay attention to our own experiences. Reading Brunig’s words I couldn’t help but think of the poet Mary Oliver, who I wrote about last week, and her repeated admonition to pay attention to the world around us. The world has so much to tell us, Oliver says, but we miss it if we’re not paying attention.

The experience of faith is the same. Don’t rush to either the priest or the scientist to get the “official” explanation. Don’t look for an explanation at all. Rather, accept it, embrace it, know it, by paying attention. Know it by listening to it at a level that transcends the brain, within the heart. This has been the teaching of the mystics for generations and what got them into trouble repeatedly with religious authorities. So don’t shove your faith experience into the authorized “God boxes” of either the theologians or the scientists. Rather, let it remain free and alive so that it can enable you to be the same.

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